


To Dust We Return

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (Non Graphic), Angst, Drug Use, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Self Destructive Behaviour, Substance Abuse, Suicidal Ideation, but can be read romantic Skimmons if you want, canon compatible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7119244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is Hive, messing with you, and you need to get help. You need to go home.”</p><p>Daisy shook her head, and buried her face, pressing her forehead against her knees and squeezing her eyes so tightly shut she saw patterns of light.</p><p>“I can’t,” she choked. “I can’t.”</p><p>-</p><p>Prompt: Daisy turns to substance abuse to cope with Hive withdrawal. Set post-3x22.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Dust We Return

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Daisy turns to substance abuse to cope with Hive withdrawal. Contains non-graphic drug use & abuse & withdrawal, suicidal ideation, and self-destructive behaviour. Set post-3x22. Angst with a H/C ending.

She’d thought it would be fun: on the road again, independent, a fresh start and a new name, just like before. Only, she’d forgotten how painfully lonely it had been, before. It was even worse now, because they followed her around like ghosts.

Daisy watched Harry Potter, and heard Simmons nattering in her ear about how well developed the magical world was, and how she should definitely read the books because there was so much the movies (films, Simmons always called them), left out. She found the first one at a goodwill store, but it was so tattered and dog-eared she couldn’t bring herself to buy it – not for her own sake, but because Simmons had always promised to lend or buy Daisy her own set, and Simmons would never treat her books like that.

When she got to the bit where Harry sat in the window and looked out at the snow, Daisy realised she was crying. She paused the video, and drew her knees up to her chest, and bit her lip. She took long, deep breaths, trying to calm herself, only there was nothing to calm. She wasn’t feeling that pressure loneliness usually brought her, to scream at the sky – she could barely even feel the world tingling around her in time with the cells of her body. Tears wet her face, but instead of mad, or sad, she felt empty.

She didn’t get much sleep that night. Perhaps it was the bad dreams: running through a dark forest, monsters on her tail, the bodies and voices of those she loved detached from one another and screaming. Perhaps it was just the racing heart, and the very real, very physical ache in her chest, like she was lying under an anvil. Grimacing, she pressed the ball of her hand to the source of the pain, as if she could dislodge it, but of course, she could not.

“That’s normal.”

Daisy jumped, as a kind and familiar face appeared beside her. _Lincoln?_ Her jaw dropped. Of course this couldn’t be real, but there was so much detail, she could have reached out and touched him, and when he put his hand over hers, she could have sworn she felt something.

“This is what they were warning you about,” Lincoln continued. “Addiction. Withdrawal. This is Hive, messing with you, and you need to get help. You need to go home.”

Daisy shook her head, and buried her face, pressing her forehead against her knees and squeezing her eyes so tightly shut she saw patterns of light.

“I can’t,” she choked. “I can’t.”

She clenched her fists and opened her eyes, and Lincoln was gone. She bit her lip: was that better, or worse?

-

She ran out of money quickly, but she was used to that. She operated on a mostly empty stomach, spare change and opportunistic arrivals at cafes. More and more, though, she picked pockets. Probably more than she strictly needed to, to be honest, but it was becoming the highlight of her day to make someone feel pressure, or a tingle, and check their valuables right before she ambushed them from around the corner.

In a few weeks, Daisy had a collection of high-end business phones she blanked and dropped around the inner city; people there would have use for them, she was sure, and their previous owners could always buy another. She had a reasonable amount of cash, too: she was on a stable two meals a day, now, sometimes with snacks in between. And cards. Most people were smart, and would have cancelled them when they realised their wallets and purses were gone, so she usually ditched those as soon as possible, but sometimes if she was feeling daring she made a few quick stops first.

She also had a rapidly growing collection of random junk. Old receipts she threw out, but she kept vouchers and loyalty cards; hairpins and elastics; a lipstick; a necklace; even a few condoms.

One day, she swiped a tiny plastic bag of white powder. It wasn’t sugar, she knew that much instantly, and given the extremely low chances of anyone walking around with a spoonful of flour in their handbag, it had to be something else. What, exactly, she wasn’t sure: there were plenty of drugs that came in the form of white powder. But most of those drugs were supposed to make you happy, and that thought was what made her hold the bag to the light, and study it for an inordinate amount of time.

She shouldn’t take it, that much was obvious. She’d known a few drug users in her time, some of them pretty hardcore about it, but daring and dangerous cocktails or no, you were never supposed to take something without knowing what it was. The only thing Daisy could eliminate from her experience was LSD, and maybe marijuana; she’d either seen or heard of anything else as a white powder, and some of that powder could really mess a person up.

She shouldn’t take it. But she couldn’t leave it anywhere either. Her fingerprints were all over it now, and she was in the system from foster care, unless Terrigenisis had done more to her than she’d thought. Besides, even if she got away with dropping it, somebody around wherever she left it might get the blame for it, or might even take it, or an animal might eat it…anything could happen. But she also couldn’t turn it in, if she wanted to stay below the radar, which she definitely did, especially since she’d stolen it in the first place, and couldn’t remember who from.

Daisy dropped it into the box with the rest of the random junk – after all, it wasn’t like she was planning to whip out the condoms anytime soon either – and stuffed it as far under her bed as she could reach. There. Done with it. At least for now. She sat back down on her bed with a huff, trying to wipe her hands and mind of it, but the niggling thought refused to leave her alone. If she only took a little, of whatever it was, surely nothing that bad could happen, right? And maybe she could even figure out what it was, by taking it. _Science._  

Her mood dropped again, thinking of that, and thinking how hard and fast both Fitz and Simmons would shut down this magical mystery tour she was thinking of taking. The pain in her chest returned. This time, Daisy was sure, it was almost all loneliness and not physical withdrawal, but she squeezed her eyes shut in case the hallucinations came back: they were bad enough in photorealism, and she knew they could get a lot more grotesque than that. She couldn’t help but think about Fitz, and if this was how he had felt, living in fear of watching his hallucinatory Simmons turn into a monster or bleed out in front of him or tell him to do something self destructive and convince him she was helping. Had she been really sure - Daisy wondered, scolding herself – that he had been taking his medication after all?

She opened her laptop, always a trusty and loyal companion, and dug around for something to distract herself. Thinking of Fitz, and longing for a thrill on the dangerous side, she ended up with Paranormal Activity. This time through, she barely even jumped.

-

The loneliness was the worst of it. It ate away at her. It ate away at her appetite, at her smile, at everything - even at the cheap thrills of watching people flail as she picked their pockets. Once, she had been able to feel the world sing, and she had filled the bottomless void of Inhumanity inside her with that feeling. Knowing, feeling, that the world was alive and vibrant had helped her see the silver linings even when she felt like everything was grey and empty. Knowing that she was a part of something, part of a race and part of a universe and that she was alive and vibrant too, had been the most fulfilling discovery of her life – even more than finding her parents. At least, it had been until Hive.

Hive had amplified everything. Had made it feel like her world was plated in gold even as he suffocated her family and turned everything to dust. He hollowed out the joy she’d found in Inhumanity, and turned it all on himself: Inhumanity was created by Hive, for Hive, and so without him, any thought of it felt pointless. Like she was not special after all. Just a freak, like she always had been.

On good days, she knew this was wrong. She knew Hive’s ecstasy had been a shallow one, and that she had people who really loved and missed her, and that she really had made a difference in people’s lives. She’d saved the world – or helped, at least.

On bad days, though, she couldn’t even bring herself to get out of bed, let alone leave the van. She barely ate, and relished the hunger. She deserved it. She deserved that emptiness, that weakness, and really, what was the point of anything else anyway? Maybe she would eventually turn to dust herself, too, and stop bringing others down with her. On some days – on very bad days – she wondered if she shouldn’t just help the process along a bit.

On one of these very bad days, she climbed into the driver’s seat of her van and started the engine and all she thought about was the water, until she reached the waterfront and remembered something about not being able to open the door underwater. Something about…you couldn’t get out until the vacuum was broken? Or was that about the water not being able to get in?

Catching herself ask this question, she slammed on the brakes and cut the engine. She ran a hand through her hair, breathing heavily in case some sort of oxygen deprivation to the brain had induced such irrational, dangerous thinking.

“Shit. Shit.” She lifted her hands off the wheel to find them trembling violently. She swallowed and breathed, until her fluttering heart started to stable out. “I need help.”

She lunged for the boxes under her bed, frantically searching through them for a phone that would call home. Instead, she found the little white bag, and bit her lip. She looked at the mess around her, at the mess she had become, and at the van that had been her home, her life, for so long before Shield. She had survived so long before them on her own, and if she could keep going without them, they would be safer and happier for it. She wouldn’t need much. Just enough to lift her out of this depression valley she was in, get herself back on track, start eating and exercising again. Maybe even get a job this time. It could be good. It would be good. Just one quick fix.

But of course, driven as she was by a potent concoction of guilt, loneliness and need, it was never going to have worked out that way.

Daisy’s addition spiralled. Getting a job was right out, unless doing minor, mostly not-entirely-legal ‘jobs’ on the computer for cash or drugs counted. For a while, she felt in control of it, and the desire felt like motivation, like recovery – but underneath, all the while, was rotting loneliness. When she couldn’t get work, she stole money, and she stole phones and sold them instead of giving them away. It was still petty crime – she could have done a lot worse – but she could not truthfully say she was unaware of how far she was letting it push her. Still, she’d let Hive push her to worse, so as long as she didn’t let it make her hurt people, she was happy – in whatever form that came these days.

Eventually, she did crash her van after all. Not into the ocean this time, and not out of a desire to stop living. In fact, she had calculated the process multiple times, to make sure to avoid that. It was a technique she’d heard circling around other dealers and users, to get access to hospital-grade painkillers and – for the more daring amongst them – with the added benefit of paying back debts, or even potentially starting up their own business, by stealing extra meds on the way out. This was the main reason that drove Daisy to it; people didn’t carry around much cash these days, and security on stolen goods was higher than it had been, so it was difficult to support a drug habit on petty crime. Not to mention, she remembered from some of her injuries pre-Hive, morphine was pretty sweet stuff.

Sweeter still, was the first face she saw when she woke up in the hospital.

“Jemma?”

In the soft, dreamy light, Simmons looked like an angel. Her worried expression and the tears shining in her eyes were so perfectly remembered, Daisy could hardly believe it. It was hard, this time, to shut her eyes, but she’d rather live on that one last heavenly image than watch the rotting loneliness eat away at her. She couldn’t let this scene turn into the forest, with darkness and screaming and blood…although, perhaps she’d risk it for just a few more seconds of feeling as warm and loved as she did now.

Daisy opened her eyes again, just a crack, and Simmons was still there. Slowly, Daisy recovered some sense of where her limbs were, and dumbly reached up to touch her face. Simmons sat still and gentle, letting Daisy get her bearings, and didn’t shy away when Daisy’s fingers brushed her cheek. Daisy gasped as the skin that met her fingers was solid and real; not the ghost of a feeling like Lincoln had been.

“You’re real,” Daisy breathed.

“And worried about you,” Simmons insisted. “We all are. Do you have any idea what you just did to us? To get an alert like that? Daisy! We gave you a phone to call us if you needed help!”

Belatedly, Daisy dragged herself into a sitting position and moved her focus from Simmons to the other people in the room, in the chairs by the wall: Coulson; Fitz; Elena – one fist around her necklace and the other furiously holding Mack’s.

“Where’s-“

“May’s getting a nurse. She wants to sign you out as soon as possible.” Simmons took Daisy’s outstretched hand between her own, and squeezed it gently, willing herself not to weep with relief. “Daisy. Why didn’t you call us?”

“I…didn’t think I needed help,” Daisy explained reluctantly. “I did it on purpose.”

She twitched away, for some buried reason expecting a tongue lashing for her recklessness. Instead, Simmons held her hand tighter, and the others stirred in their seats.

“We know,” Fitz explained, hardly able to look at her with the pain of it. “They asked us if we knew any reason you might want to hurt yourself.”

“I didn’t want to die,” Daisy hurried to assure them. “I wasn’t trying to – to do that.” _This time._ “I just…I wanted…”

“The morphine,” Mack guessed. Daisy lowered her eyes and stared at the thread she was picking. She could already feel her eyes filling up, her throat closing over, faced with all their love for her and how close she had come to throwing it away. To never letting herself feel it again.

“I didn’t mean for it to get this far,” she explained, as tears began to drip onto her bed sheets. “I just wanted something to fill the void and I…I'm in trouble. It started small and it got out of control and I’m _sorry.”_

Simmons moved out of her chair at that moment, and sat on the bed beside Daisy. As best she could, with the angles and drip in the way, she wrapped her arms around Daisy and pulled her close, and offered a platitude that actually meant something, if only because Daisy had denied it to herself for so long.

“It’s going to be okay.”


End file.
